“It’s sort of odd, because I still am kind of baffled by silk,” he said in an interview near his Greenwich Village studio. “I think it’s mostly that I have a respect for it. The great thing about silk is you don’t want to tame it. You don’t want to flatten it and stretch it and pull it. You want to let it be wild. And you have to just create the conditions where it can do that and then stand back.”

In “The Rite of Spring,” which makes its New York debut on Wednesday as part of the White Light Festival, Mr. Twist continues his astonishing inventiveness with silk and other seemingly ordinary materials — folded paper, curling smoke — in a production that deepens his otherworldly melding of abstract puppetry and music. His revelatory “Symphonie Fantastique” (1998) was performed inside a water tank and reimagined what puppets could be: fabric and feathers kicking up a storm to Berlioz.

But in “Rite,” which he calls “a ballet without dancers,” Mr. Twist’s canvas is an entire theater. (The all-Stravinsky program, to be presented at the Rose Theater, will include new interpretations of “Fireworks” and the “Pulcinella Suite.”)

“Ever since I made ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ it seemed obvious: Why don’t you do more of this choreography from materials?” he asked. “The concept of doing something bigger had danced around my brain for a long time.”

He knew the music fairly well. As a child growing up in San Francisco, Mr. Twist used “Rite” as a soundtrack to some movies he made with his siblings. “For, like,” as he put it, “a chase sequence.” But while working in France on Lee Breuer’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Mr. Twist immersed himself in it.

“I would Rollerblade around Paris and listen to ‘The Rite of Spring,’ ” he said. “At some point, I was just like: ‘I have to do this with a full orchestra. I can’t play it safe.’ ”

Mr. Twist got his wish. “Rite,” commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts, is accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In it he aims to reflect the intensity of the 1913 Ballets Russes premiere, when Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s modern, aggressive choreography provoked a near riot in Paris. The music endured, but the ballet disappeared after only nine performances.

For “Rite,” Mr. Twist wanted to recapture the fluidity and chaos he achieved in “Symphonie.” As he discovered, wet fabric is a sad, limp thing, but when floating it reveals the shape of water. Billowing silk has allowed him to recapture that feeling on land. “Smoke does the same thing: You can see the air when it’s filled with smoke,” he said. “You can tell if it’s falling or shooting up or turned into some sort of wave.”

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“The Rite of Spring” makes its New York debut on Wednesday as part of the White Light Festival.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

Amid the swirling smoke and flowing silk are puppeteers, whom Mr. Twist does not take pains to hide. “It’s like they’re the rioters at the premiere, or they’re the orchestra, so I have them in tuxedo tails,” Mr. Twist said. “But they’re on the periphery. They’re the crew of the ship that’s tossing at sea, and they’re struggling with this machine or trying to run it, and at some point the whole operation turns on them and plucks one of them and throws him into the center.”

That person turns out to be the chosen one, Christopher Williams, who has worked with Mr. Twist for 15 years. The idea came to Mr. Twist in a dream: He saw a whirl of fabric, like a tornado of silk, and stuck in the middle was Mr. Williams. Yes, there actually is a dancer in “Rite” — in a way.

“I perform steps, but I really feel like I am one of Basil’s puppets, which is really kind of amazing,” Mr. Williams explained. “It’s a way I’ve never danced before. I’m not the sacrificial virgin. I am being menaced by the entire theater. At the end, it’s the idea of something organic growing out of the human spirit that conquers the giant, theatrical puppet.”

For Mr. Twist, “Rite” encapsulates ideas about modernism, and though his production is abstract, the furious imagery in it isn’t unrelated to environmental issues. He recalled the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. “There was that horrific film that wouldn’t stop of that tube just spewing black into this green ocean,” Mr. Twist said. “It’s Day 15, and it’s still shooting out, not slowing down, not stopping — they put the cap on it, and it fell off. It was all gorgeous and so intense and graphic and sexual in a way too, but also so horrific and tragic. I was like, that’s ‘The Rite of Spring.’ ”

But while his “Rite” is full of darkness and decay, “at its most crunched and condensed, there’s a beautiful soul — a catharsis — that transforms it,” he said, adding, “That creates an opening for a possibility.”

Mr. Twist said that he did not think of himself as a storyteller but a creator of time-based experiences. He does, rightly, consider himself a choreographer; he collaborated with Christopher Wheeldon on full-length versions of “Cinderella” (2012) and “The Winter’s Tale” (2014).

“He so clearly understands movement,” Mr. Wheeldon said. “There’s something very fluid and choreographic about his work and the way he’s able to make inanimate objects suddenly look like they’re really dancing.”

For Mr. Twist, who worked his silk magic in “Before the Dawn,” Kate Bush’s stage show in London, dancers are not only artists but warriors. Recently, he started rehearsing a new piece with the dancer Wendy Whelan; the experience has helped him realize how similar ballet partnering is to puppetry. He is even considering studying ballet.

“I’d like to,” he said, almost bashfully. “I have such admiration for dancers — like beyond. And this recent thing, where I’ve been lucky enough to work in the ballet, I’m just eating it up. I love it so much. It makes me even more like, ‘Oh, I will never do that.’ So I haven’t yet.” He smiled. “But I know I’m a good dancer.”

“The Rite of Spring” will be performed Wednesday through Saturday at the Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway and 60th Street; 212-721-6500, whitelightfestival.org.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Weaving Silk Into Puppetry and Music. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe